Zipcar Presents . . .

Zipcar had a little party in Portland for the community two nights ago at the Cinemagic theater on SE Hawthorne, something they called a “drive-in.”

The deal of the night was that if you donated your old car you got a free membership and $250 worth of driving credits (and we all got a showing of the movie Arctic Tale . . .). One of the beauties of Zipcar is that they’re literally taking cars off the road, not just that night, but every day.

I’d heard that Scott Griffith and Mark Norman were coming in from Boston to attend the event, who are the CEO and COO of Zipcar, and that was a draw for me, too. After reading the recent Inc. piece about Zip, I wanted to hear more about their Web strategy because it feels to me like there’s an enormous amount of customer energy that can be tapped online that’s not being taken advantage of.

It happened that while I was checking out a Zipcar Mini parked in front of Cinemagic, I ended up standing right next to Scott who was using his phone to take a picture of the front of the theater impressively lit up with “Zipcar presents . . . ,” and we got a chance to talk for a few minutes.

Clearly, Scott is a believer in his own company. He loves Zipcar, he’s not just running it, you could feel that. And a reason for this is that he knows Zipcar has found itself, with maybe just a handful of other companies, at the intersection of a profound shift in technology, environment, and lifestyle, that has accelerated - noticeably - over the last five years. His company gets to be part of that change every day.

And that’s also translated to growth. Five years ago, Zipcar was a $2M company. That’s when Scott became CEO (in February of 2003). Today it’s $100M. He told me that his biz-school friends asked him “Why are you taking that assignment?” Obviously, he saw the potential . . . just maybe not that it would be this fast, this big.

If they get to $1B in revenue, which is now the goal, and one Scott believes is more than attainable, it will be a business story for the ages. Even Salesforce.com, which took a radical approach to business software and is now a $1B plus company at only eight-years old because of it, grew out of an established industry. Car sharing has come out of nowhere.

But potential is one thing, execution another. As a customer, I have firsthand experience with how Scott and his crew have jumped all over that potential. For example, the online and in-vehicle reservation system is rock solid and Apple-smooth, a whole step up from what Flexcar was doing. My inner 007 couldn’t be happier.

The “queen-bee” backend systems Zipcar has in order to handle reservation activity in real time across all of the US and international cities in its network so that I never have to think about it, so that my single wallet-size membership card will work on any car in any of those cities, are obviously industrial strength and full of analytical smarts.

And it stands to reason that if this technology is making it easy and fun for drivers, it’s also spitting data that’s pure gold out the other side; data that Zipcar is using, much like Google, to make the network even better: more members, more cars, lower prices, less friction . . . you get the picture.

In fact, it was by analyzing car use in each neighborhood five years ago that allowed Scott and his team, as I understand the story, to create the essential building block for successfully scaling the service. How many cars does each neighborhood need so that a customer doesn’t have to wait? What kind of car are they using? Are they using the the car for recreation or for work? That’s what they figured out.

They knew if they got the neighborhood right when it was a $2M company, then it would hum along at $50M and $100M. Not that they haven’t been stretched - rolling out to London hasn’t been without a learning curve, Scott said - but, my point is, if you take the time to plant acorns . . . and they did.

So, data and building things out based on that data has been the lifeblood of Zipcar, again, much like Google, since the beginning. They’ve got the network down, the service wired.

But, what they’re not doing - all you have to do is go to their website (the same one that does such a great job with the reservation service) or google the Web in general to see this - is taking advantage of the social aspects of the Web. (Nor did Flexcar.) That is, they’re not using the Internet to connect with members and get them connected to one another . . . and the tens of thousands future Zipcar members out there.

Google has an excuse. Search doesn’t have a social component. Adwords/Adsense isn’t about culture or community; it’s about the hyper-coordination of buyers and sellers. But Zipcar could have its cake and eat it, too. They could take their great network and build a community right on top of it.

What would be brilliant, for example, is if they built a separate site that people, members and non-members, could use to do assessments of their urban life: How am I using technology to save time and make life simpler? What is the environmental impact? How can I get a higher score on a “lifestyle index?”

Something like this would set in motion self-perpetuating marketing (anti-marketing, really) for Zipcar because it would get all the Zipsters out there to tell the urban lifestyle story to each other - to work it out with each other - which includes how to optimize their use of car sharing (. . . speaking of useful data).

All Zipcar would have to do is host the party and keep saying “we’re listening.” And maybe point to it with other lightweight apps like Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook, and Vimeo, etc.

To have the kind of social capital Zipcar has, particularly after merging with Flexcar, and not invest it in a Web strategy of some kind would be so unfortunate. Not only would Zip get to $1B a lot faster, but it would reach and be able to sustain/surpass one of its critical metrics: 40% usage per car. Yes, what I’m saying is that on the Web “community” is a path to greater efficiency, self service, and fatter margins.

But simultaneously it would give members a deeper stake in the company, a voice, perhaps even a role, and that’s going to matter (a lot) as Zipcar builds to $1B. Stay big, but stay small, right? There’s no better way to do that then tap into the social Web.

I don’t think Scott is there yet, simply because he hasn’t experienced the Web at this level (that’s my take), but my guess is that, given what he’s done and who he seems to be, it’s going to hit him like a lightening bolt one day. And should be quite a flick.